On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 10:11:38AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 07:48:17PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > Moreover, we need these licenses to be recognized as open-source by > > Debian and other authorities before even considering to use them. > > The problem you are going to end up with for this, though, is that there is > no authoritative English version of the licences. The translation of the
Bah, whatever, the first and only copy of this licence i have seen was in english, so what is the problem ? > CECILL licence we've seen so far was non-authoritative, and hence no actual > decision can be made about it's freeness. Most of the organisations you're > going to want to get recognition from are primarily English-speaking > organisations. You might be able to get FSF-Europe to give the OK for the > FSF, if they've got good French-speaking licence analysers, and if OSI's I don't care, i want debian to give its ok. > licence vetting process is what I've heard it is (trusting the drafting > lawyer's assertion that it's OK) you might be OK there, but I doubt > debian-legal is going to be able to discuss a licence without an > authoritative English version to work from. So, everybody here should learn french :) No, seriously, we have enough french speaking developers that this should not be a problem, and since there is an english translation (and as said, the first link i found was a 9 page or so english PDF), this should be no major problem. Also, i believe that this is one of the usefull input you could provide to the comittee developing those licences, don't you think. > The other problem with only having a French licence is that anyone who can't > fluently read French is going to have no idea what the terms are under which > they can modify the software. That's going to mean that you'll either have > a lot of potential contributors down the tubes, or a lot of people > infringing your licence without knowing it. Relying on an unofficial > translation of the licence isn't going to help much, either. Bah. It is no worse than the lha japanese licence, but i think that your worries are exagerated, and that there will be an english translation of it. > Note that these problems do also exist for English language licences and > non-English speakers, but in practical terms they are diminished because > (for better or worse) most people have at least a basic knowledge of > English. We are well forced to it. Friendly, Sven Luther